Why place individual solar panels on top of a pre-existing roof when you could just build an entire roof with solar technology integrated into it? Elon Musk, CEO of the financially underperforming Solar City and Tesla, sees it as an obvious solution. According to CNNMoney, he said that "If your... View full entry »

SolarCity's solar panels with Tesla's electric vehicles and stationary storage batteries was "what the world needs, the ultimate solution" to a sustainable-energy future.

"As a combined automotive and power storage and power generation company, the potential is there for Tesla to be a trillion-dollar market cap company," [Musk] added. [...]

Musk said costs for both companies would go down significantly after the merger, but he did not give specifics.
— reuters.com

Elon Musk already sits on the board and owns 22% of the Buffalo-based SolarCity, "the leading installer of residential solar panels" in the US. Musk is convinced that the merger is a no-brainer, but according to Reuters, analysts aren't so smitten with the prospect."While we don't doubt that some... View full entry »

When production begins, SolarCity, already the leading installer of residential solar panels in the [U.S.] will become a vertically integrated manufacturer and provider...At a time when conventional silicon-based solar panels from China have never been cheaper, investing in a new type of solar technology is a risky undertaking. However, the potential benefits are huge. The new factory...could transform both SolarCity’s business...and the economics of residential solar power.
— MIT Technology Review

The MIT Technology Review profiles the upcoming Buffalo-based SolarCity factory and their ambitious plans that could potentially make solar power technology more widely available to consumers.More news about alternative energy:Cloud-harvesting skyscraper: renderings of proposed new sustainable... View full entry »

SolarCity, the Silicon Valley solar installer, has quietly begun to offer some homeowners a lithium-ion battery pack made by electric carmaker Tesla to store electricity generated by their rooftop photovoltaic arrays. Stem, another Silicon Valley company, will sell or lease a $100,000, 54-kilowatt-hour battery pack to businesses so they can arbitrage the grid by storing electricity when rates are cheap and then using that energy when they’re high.
— qz.com